I quite like it but there is still some jaggieness - increasing the AA another step puts render time way up, hoping someone could advise if tweaking FG settings and filter settings alone could help smooth it out.

One last question - since I want to animate this, and the hard edge of the plane isn't very nice, I thought of using a circular ramp mapped to transparency to fade it out, or extruding up the outer edges to create a basin. Not sure what would be best.

The easiest and best way (IMHO) to achieve the "clay render" look is to use the Ambient Occlusion material in MR and render with that, it produces some nice results and really helps to show off details.

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